The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was named after the black teenager whose murder in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 marked a turning point in the civil rights era.
Till, 14, was traveling from his Chicago home to visit relatives in Mississippi when he claimed he whistled at a white woman. Till was abducted, beaten and shot in the head. A large metal fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire before his body was thrown into a river. His grieving mother insisted on an open coffin to show everyone how her son had been abused.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. B. Milam, were charged but acquitted by sworn all-white men. Bryant and Milam later told a reporter that they kidnapped and killed Till.
Biden acknowledged the long delay in legislation during statements in Rose Garden to lawmakers, government officials and civil rights activists, stressing how the violent deaths of black Americans were used to intimidate them and prevent them from voting simply because of him. their skin color.
US President Joe Biden speaks after the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed at the Rose Garden at the White House on Tuesday. (Patrick Semansky / The Associated Press)
“Thank you for never giving up, never giving up,” he said. “The lynching was a pure terror to impose the lie that not everyone belongs, not everyone, in America, not everyone is equal.”
However, the president stressed that forms of racial terrorism continue to exist in the United States – creating the need for law.
“Racist hatred is not an old problem – it is a persistent problem,” Biden said. “Hate never goes away. It just hides.”
The new law makes it possible to prosecute a crime as lynching when a conspiracy to commit hate crime leads to death or serious bodily harm, according to the bill’s Democrat MP Bobby Russ. The law provides for a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and fines.
An undated portrait shows Emmett Till. (The Associated Press)
The anti-lynching bill was passed almost 200 times
Parliament approved bill 422-3 on March 7, with eight members abstaining after approving the Senate by unanimous consent. Russ had also introduced a bill in January 2019 which Parliament voted 410-4 before the measure stopped in the Senate. Congress first considered anti-lynching laws more than 120 years ago. He had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, starting with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina MP George Henry White, the only black member of Congress at the time. The NAACP began pushing for anti-lynching laws in the 1920s. A federal hate crime law was finally passed and signed into law in the 1990s, decades after the civil rights movement.
